13 entries categorized "Slavery"

April 01, 2015

Indiana's Religious Freedom law has triggered a spirited debate throughout the nation and may be the next right wing attack on civil rights. Here's my Chicago Defender Column on the controversy.

What’s bad for the gays will be bad for the Blacks

Monroe Anderson

Defender Columnist

If you haven’t been paying attention to the firestorm over Indiana’s “freedom of religion” law, it’s time that you do. Our neighboring state’s new legislation reflects Black America’s past and could easily come to mirror our future.

The bill is rightly being described as a license to discriminate. It allows anyone with a business to not do business with anyone they choose by claiming they believe it violates their religious values.

We’ve seen this play before.

God and religion have been used as the guiding principle in overt discrimination against Blacks throughout virtually all of our nation’s history. The KKK burned crosses before lynching Black men. Bigoted Christians cited the curse of Ham, the father of Canaan in Genesis, to justify slavery. “Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.”

Ham is believed to have been a Black man.

Unequal public schools for Blacks were the will of the Almighty opined Georgia Gov. Allen Candler in 1901, “God made them negroes and we cannot by education make them white folks.”

Nor did God cotton to miscegenation. Richard Loving, a white man, was sentenced to one year in prison for marrying Mildred Jeter, a Black woman. The couple had broken Virginia's law, the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, by going to Washington, D.C. to get married then naively returning to home.

Apparently the Lovings had broken the Holy Father’s law as well. “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents,” wrote Judge Leon M. Bazile in his 1959 ruling. “The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act does not mention same-sex mixing but it’s arguably aimed at those with a certain sexual orientation. Last year, the same-sex marriage ban was overturned by a federal court. Some pouting proponents, who wanted the ban to stand, headed straight for the governor and the Indiana General Assembly to make sure there would be a freedom of religion law on guard to protect bigotry, as they knew it.

The state’s RFRA is yet another Republican head-fake where conservatives pretend that they’re not doing anything wrong while they’re definitely doing something wrong. Just like the GOP’s scheme to suppress Black participation at the ballot box through voter I.D. laws, the religious freedom law would allow business owners the right to use their faith as an excuse not to serve lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transsexuals, aka LGBTs--or hire or rent to them.

Black Americans know all too well how that game is played and if the new rules remain legalized then it won’t be long before it’s played on us. Again.

The legislation Gov. Pence signed last week prohibits state laws that “substantially burden” a religious institution, businesses and associations from following religious beliefs. The new law in effect serves as a legal shield for people, associations and businesses big and small from being sued for discrimination if they claim their religion made them do it.

The uproar that followed caught Indiana’s governor off guard. He reflectively characterized it as a battle between religious freedom and gay rights, assuming he knew who’d win that fight.

Gov. Pence, and his overly weighted Republican General Assembly, quickly discovered that they were wrong. Besides the sign-carrying LGBT protesters, Indiana’s state lawmakers heard disapproval from other states, businesses, sports organizations, future conventioneers and social media.

The CEOs from Eli Lilly and Co., Anthem and Indiana University Health were among nine of Indiana’s largest employers pointing out that discriminatory legislation was bad for business. Seattle’s mayor and Connecticut’s governor banned their employees from traveling to Indiana to do business. Indianapolis-based Angie’s List CEO announced that his company was going to halt plans for a $40 million expansion in the state’s capital. The president of NCAA, whose Final Four competition takes place in Indianapolis this weekend, said yesterday that Indiana's new "religious freedom" law goes against what higher education and America is all about. And there is, of course, a social media response: On Twitter the hashtag is #boycottindiana.

All that outrage has focused Gov. Pence’s mind like a hanging. He was claiming that Indiana’s RFRA law was no different from the one in Illinois and the other 18 states that passed one. Pence left out the part about those other states having a separate law that specifically protected LGBTs from discrimination, while his state does not. You can be fired in Indiana for being gay.

Over the weekend, he was asserting that the law wouldn’t be changed. Yesterday he held a press conference to announce that maybe it would. He’s having his legislature revamp the onerous law.

June 19, 2009

On this Juneteenth Day, all of America ought to be celebrating like it's 1999. Yesterday, after 144 years of emancipation commemorations by African Americans in Texas, and progressively over time, many other states, the United States Senate finally got around to--Tweet this--apologizing for slavery and racial segregation. The formal sorry say was voted on by the Senate yesterday.

Talk about too little, too late.

The Emancipation Proclamation was issued on September 22, 1862. And although it went into effect on January 1, 1883, more than 618,000 Americans had to die in the Civil War before the slaves were freed.

Back then, good news traveled slow, so it wasn't until June 19, 1865 that word got around to the state of Texas that slavery had been abolished. And even after everyone knew that slavery was the great American evil, there were those in the South who chose not to know. Slavery By Another Name, a book published last year, revealed that the enslavement of African Americans continued in the deep South until the dawn of World War II. This nation's free black labor habit finally ended eight decades after Emancipation when President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered that it stop immediately. FDR was fearful that the Japanese propaganda machine would put the fact that neoslavery was still going on in the U.S. to great use against America's war effort.

Up until then, it was the practice below the Mason-Dixon line for sheriffs to arrest black men on trumped up charges, jail them, then sell them to plantations, mines, railroads, mills, lumber camps and factories in the deep South. In other cases, southern blacks were kidnapped by southern landowners and forced into involuntary labor. This happened to thousands of African Americans from one generation to the next to the one after that.

And I won't even mention the thousands who were murdered by lynchings.

But to quote Shakespeare, "All's well that ends well." The senate has apologized for slavery and segregation. The U.S. House is expected to follow suit. There's a black family living in White House.

African American no longer have to worry about forced labor. Unfortunately, black unemployment rates, at 11.5, are higher than those of any of group in the nation. About a third of the descendants of America's enslaved still live below the poverty line.

It doesn't matter. The Senate is sorry. I wonder if any of them are sorry that we never got our 40 acres and a mule. It's not too late to make it up. Congress could declare reparations a stimulus program and pass it just in time for next year's Juneteeth Day.

February 21, 2009

When it comes to the rabid right, perennial loser Alan Keyes comes off effortlessly as the big dog.

I witnessed him spouting his coo-coonalities while foaming at the mouth on a regular basis back in 2004 when Illinois Republicans, for want of ANYBODY to put up a pretend challenge to State Sen. Barack Obama for the U.S. senate seat, recruited Keyes from Maryland.

I immediately saw it as a cynical move by the state Republicans to pit their Black against the Black Democratic candidate, reasoning that one African-American was as good as the next. I would later come to that same conclusion when the Republican National Committee would con Sen. John McCain into partnering with Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin, figuring since the Democrats failed to put Hillary Clinton on the Obama ticket, their woman candidate was as good as the junior senator from New York would have been.

Both gambits proved to be the undoing of the Repubs.

Obama went on to become the second Black U.S. senator from Illinois within a decade. Oh yeah, and with a big hand from the lipstick-wearing Pitbull, he's now the POTUS.

As Obama's challenger for the U.S. senate seat, carpetbagger Keyes came off as whacked out on peyote-laced Jesus juice. Keyes accused Obama's position on abortion as the "slaveholder's position." Keyes asserted that Obama's Lord and Savior wouldn't even vote for the Democrat. Before it was over, Keyes had throughly embarassed the Illinois Republicans, exposing how dim-witted their decision to draft Keyes had been. And when it was over, Keyes lost to Obama, 27 to 70 percent.

Now, he's back at it. In a video that surfaced yesterday, Keyes calls President Obama "a radical communist" and said he refused to acknowledge the validity of Obama's inauguration because the President is not a U.S. citizen. You've got to hear him to believe him before coming to the conclusion I came to long ago: Alan Keyes is all babble and all psycho too.

February 10, 2009

In an erathat some are trying to bill at post-racial, South Carolina state senator Robert Ford is seeking to take us way back to the post-Reconstruction epoch. Ford, who is of African American descent, is trying to get a bill passed that requires South Carolina to give workers a paid day off for Confederate Memorial Day.

This gives a whole new context to the term House Negro.

In a senate bill that won initial approval last week in a subcommittee, Ford wants to force South Carolina county and municipal governments to give workers a paid holiday off on May 10 to honor Confederate war dead. Mississippi and Alabama already celebrate a Confederate Memorial Day.

In a Rodney King-like "can't we all get along" spirit, years ago Ford pushed a bill that would make Dr. King's birthday and a dead Rebels day separate but equal holidays.

"Every municipality and every citizen of South Carolina, should be, well, forced to respect these two days and learn what they can about those two particular parts of our history," Ford said last week.

I already know way too much about the Confederacy part of that history.

A little more than a year ago, I was in South Carolina covering Barack Obama's presidential election. The State House lobby features the Orders of Secession engraved in marble, portraits of Confederate generals look down on state legislators in their chambers and the Confederate flag still flies outside.

No one has convinced far too many of the state's white citizens that the Civil War was lost and that the descendants of freed slaves are now their equals. And I am anything but convinced that a holiday honoring the soldiers who died to keep the state's blacks enslaved will help old times be soon forgotten.

But I do suspect that Ford is trying to convince a bunch of the state's white citizens that he's a good Negro. Just last month, the senator pushed a bill that would outlaw dirty words in his state, making it a felony with a penalty of up to five years behind bars for using the F-word, among others. First Amendment be damned!

It was just a year ago, remember, when Democrat Ford backed Sen. Hillary Clinton, for the Democratic presidential nomination over Obama, because every "Democrat running on that ticket next year would lose because [Obama's] black and he's top of the ticket. We'd lose the House and the Senate and the governors and everything."

Lawdy, Lawdy. Guess who just announced that he's running for governor of South Carolina? Do you think that in a post-racial era, President Barack Obama should endorse gubernatorial candidate Robert Ford--just because he's a fellow African American?

January 18, 2009

I am not alone in my belief that our 43rd president was the worst ever--Rolling Stone Magazinemade that assertion in April 2006. And while some may argue that James Buchanan did a worse job than George W. Bush, only the visually or mentally challenged will think he wasn't the worst president in modern times; he'll leave office with the lowest approval ratings in history, 22 percent

On Inauguration Day, it will be out with the worst and in, I'm hoping, with the greatest.

Nor am I alone in believing that Barack Obama will perform above and beyond the call of duty. You can tell by the numbers; 65 percent of Americans believe #44 will be an above average president. We may be in a deep recession but Brand Obama--from magazine covers to commemorative coins to wacky and weird merchandise--is booming. And you can tell it by the art. There's the iconic portrait by artist Shepard Fairey and a countless number of Obama-inspired art.

Joe, a wealthy old hippie who is in his mid-60s, has had faith and hope in Barack since the beginning. In fact, he claims pride of authorship for one of Obama's early campaign slogans--Obama Right from the Start--which is a reference to the Illinois senator's opposition to the war in Iraq.

Now that the candidate is about to become the president, the muse hit Joe up again. This time, rather than a mere slogan, it turned out to be a poem which then turned out to be a song--Five Fifths Strong: Redemption Song.

The title alludes to the infamous "three-fifths" compromise" of the Founding Fathers when they were constructing the U.S. Constitution in 1787. For those of you who are a little rusty on your American history, the "three-fifths" clause decrees that, for the purposes of counting each state's population to determine its number of Representatives in Congress and the distribution of taxes, African slaves would be counted as three-fifths of a human being.

We now have a man of African descent about to occupy the Executive House at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue which is more than a gesture affirming black Americans' rise to full citizenship.

I think Joe's song does an incredible job of capturing the triumph of the moment. While it's Joe's lyrics, the music is by Atiba Jali. Five-Fifths Strong is sung by Ray Balkcom with the All City Elementary Youth Chorus of the Chicago Public Schools.

Take a listen and let me know what you think. Just click on the blue link below.

July 18, 2008

Yesterday’s news that Jesse Jackson was caught on tape whispering the N-word is no news at all. In the black community, among African Americans, the N-word is deeply embedded and all too common. You hear it everywhere. You hear it in the grocery store from a black mother disciplining her child. You hear it on the streets from one teenager addressing another. You hear it even if you don’t live in or visit the black community. You hear it on the radio in hip-hop tunes. You hear it on cable TV while watching black comedians tell jokes. So Jesse said nothing out of the ordinary, he just said it under in a not-so-ordinary place in an extraordinary circumstance: On a Fox TV station in an open mic. Jackson’s led protests about the use of the Word and has apologized for using it. I’m sure it’s embarrassing to him and I don’t doubt the sincerity of his apology. He looks like a hypocrite. He got caught in a “do as I say, not as I do” moment. I say we all should make an effort not to ban the Word but to should it less casually and much more judiciously; that we should be extremely cautious in using it publicly and much more thoughtful when using it in private. The N-word carries weight. It’s steeped in a historical and political tradition that should not be ignored. But it’s also a bad habit with roots going all the way back to slavery. It has been handed down from one generation to the next, I think, out of self-hatred or no self-control or self-respect. So why would we want to take ownership of a word burdened with so much hatred and violence? I think we should use other American ethnic groups as an example. When is the last time you heard Adam Sandler or Jackie Mason use kike in any of their comedy routines? Did Frank Sinatra sing about wops? How often have we heard the word spic used in hip-hop songs by Daddy Yankee or Jennifer Lopez? We really need a verbal revolution. I thought that it was good that Rev. Jackson held a news conference in Los Angeles 18 months ago, leading the way in what he scolded Obama about, by “telling n-----s how to behave,” by asking black entertainers to ban the N-word. I think we should still go from old school to new. Let’s consider the observation made by the Last Poets four decades ago, that Niggers Are Scared of Revolution, then change how we use the N-word. That is, if you’re not too scared to do it.

July 08, 2008

In rare moments of weakness, I try to give black Republicans the benefit of the doubt. I tell myself they are hanging out with those who don’t want us in their country clubs, board rooms or places of worship because some of us need to be in the party for some semblance of balance—a don’t put all your political eggs in one basket strategy. I tell myself that the tainted tenth that belong to the GOP are there because they are naturally conservative and have a right to join up with some of their kind, regardless of race, creed or national origin. I tell myself that anyone who is a black Republican must be a true believer—not exactly the type that’s interested in thinking things through. Before I get anywhere close to convincing myself, the benefit of doubt gets beat down by reality: These bee-oh-cons are terribly twisted. Logically challenged, too. As conservatives, what do these African Americans want to conserve? The enduring legacy of the white masters? Jim Crow? Lynching? The modern-day justice system that disproportionately warehouses young black men in prisons? An educational system that fails black youth long before it flunks them out? It seems to me that the greatest challenge for black Republicans is to rationalize why they're part of a party--the party of Rush Limbaugh and Jesse Helms--that can barely disguise its disdain for most black folks. Why bother with reality when you can do this: Substitute the Nights with Uncle Remus for One Thousand and One Nights. With bold-faced brashness and a willy-nilly wistfulness that would put President Bush and Karl Rove to shame, the National Black Republican Association has posted their billboard proclaiming that Dr. Martin Luther King was a Republican. But wait, there’s more. I don’t want to spoil it for you. I’ll let you see for yourself. So I’m sharing their lame YouTube anti-Obama video with you. But, before you watch it, you’ll need the appropriate mood music. Try “Bring in the Clowns.” In case you don’t know the lyrics, here’s one stanza from the Judy Collins classic:

Don’t you love farce?My fault, I fearI thought that you’d want what I wantSorry, my dearBut where are the clownsSend in the clownsDon’t bother, they’re here

June 08, 2008

Shelby Steele, like Clarence Thomas, is an accomplished black men, celebrated by the right, who got a leg up thanks to affirmative action, but who now opposes it for any African American who also might need a boost to the next phase. A self-described black conservative, Steele crossed over to the selfish side and, like Justice Thomas, has become a darling of the same white folks who believe prisons are more desirable destinations for young black men than colleges and that African Americans ought to be grateful that our ancestors were kidnapped from the mother continent to be enslaved here. Through the years, Steele has done well for himself. He is a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institute and in 1990 he received the National Book Critics Circle Award for his book, The Content of Our Character, which theorized that it’s not them, it’s us—it’s not racism but our self-doubt that keeps African Americans down and out in the land of plenty. Steele's latest theory was revealed Thursday in a washingtonpost.com story, "A Run for the Ages?,” which interviews black historians on Barack Obama’s landmark victory. The good fellow predicts that the Illinois senator won’t best Republican John McCain in the November general election. Apparently, McCain's campaign team is feeling Steele’s sentiments as well. They’re so cocky they’re challenging Obama to have 10 town hall debates with the Arizona senator. I half understand why. McCain has a tiny campaign war chest while Obama’s runneth over. A series of debates will get McCain exposure on the cheap. But does the GOP standard-bearer really want to be that exposed? Not if his performance is anything like it was Tuesday, the same night Obama became the presumptive Democratic Party nominee. McCain's speech was so embarrassingly bad that even Fox Cable News--the right-wing's unofficial propaganda arm--didn't have much good to say about it.

And as for Shelby Steele and his prognosticative prowess, in his latest book, Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win, he predicted that Obama wouldn’t beat Hillary Clinton
for the Democratic Party nomination. If Steele’s really lucky, come November, at least he’ll be half right.

May 22, 2008

I watched the TV coverage of the Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Kentucky primary races with a combination of frustration and fury. For reasons that are beyond me, politicians and pundits alike are holding Barack Obama responsible for his lack of appeal to the so-called lunch bucket Democrats. Apparently, since Obama has been waging a non-racial campaign, it’s his fault that white folks whose parents were racist and who had grandparents with parents who were racists—going all the way back to the glory days of slavery—can't quite manage to cast a ballot for a black man who is running for president.I’ve written about it but reading the Rude Pundit’s post yesterday, Nigger Haters for Clinton, I realized I hadn't said it plain enough. Here’s some of what he had to say:

You ever been to the mythical "rural communities" of Appalachia? The Rude Pundit has, hanging out with mule farm owners and miners and others. And they are xenophobic, suspicious, and poor - hell, these redneck fuckers hate white outsiders. Just about every Deliverance-style, Hatfield and McCoy, Ma and Pa Kettle inbred backwards ass country fuck stereotype you ever imagined exists there, complete with their trashed front yards and about a mouth of teeth for every three or four households. And they have every right to hate people who have ripped away the jobs and kept them in deep poverty and ignorance. There's been so many promises broken to the people of Appalachia that they may as well be Indians. Hell, the last time anyone in the federal government gave a happy rat fuck about the region was in the LBJ administration.

When you talk about how Democratic they are, you are talking about the post-Civil War Democrats, when the party fostered and relied on racism and division in order to maintain power. You're talking Dixiecrats and Reagan Democrats. "Rural whites" in places like Kentucky and West Virginia wear their racism as a badge of honor. Because it's the perpetual ignorance of racism that keeps them from rising up against the whites who are actually keeping them racist, ignorant and poor.

So, is any thinking person really surprised when the Roswell Beacon runs a story about how white supremacist groups are so flummoxed by Obama’s successful campaign that they’re openly chatting on blogs about assassinating him and how they should prepare for the race war they're convinced his murder will trigger? The photo at the top of this blog is from the Georgia newspaper's cover story, White Fright. The image has sparked some controversy because, by illustrating that Obama may be in the crosshairs of white hate groups, it starkly presents the true nature of a small but vile part of America. It also highlights the undercurrent the Rude Pundit post explores. You can read that blog by clickinghere. It's about time the msm stop downplaying the rabid racism that continues to fester. Do we really need to pretend that racial hatred is dead and that Obama’s main problem is simply a matter of bridging the cultural divide?

May 02, 2008

Now that Bill Clinton has forever demolished
the curious notion that he
was the first black
president, it may be that there actually were six black commander-in-chiefs before him. Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Dwight Eisenhower may have all had black ancestors, according to a report in the North Star News. The newspaper quotes black historians who researched the ancestry of our presidents. Early on in American history, the “one-drop rule” was instituted. That meant if one drop of Negro blood could be traced back in a person’s ancestry, then no matter how white they looked, no matter how white they had been raised, no matter what, they were black. Of course, the reality was just the opposition. Enslaved African women were getting equal doses of white blood for their offspring when their white slave masters and overseers routinely raped them. Those half-white children were born into slavery and were in turn impregnated by white masters and overseers. The offspring of the mulattoes and their white masters were called quadroons. Another white master dip in that genetic pool a generation later produced octoroons. Somewhere along that racial recession, those kind of black people started becoming white. They escaped the plantation, moved elsewhere and blended into the dominant white society. Following that historical racial development, according to the North Star News, one historian says Dwight Eisenhower's mother, Ida Elizabeth Stover Eisenhower, was black. The painting above by my wife, artist Joyce Owens, is of Louise Evans, a former slave from North Carolina who was interviewed and photographed during the WPA era. You wouldn’t know the woman was black to look at her. There are many more of you out there. Applying the one-drop rule, a fourth of all Americans who think they are white may, in fact, be black. Now back to our white/black presidents. Here’s how the April-May 2008 North Star News begins:

Barack Obama May Become The SeventhNot The First, Black President

If Sen. Barack Obama wins the Democratic nomination for preside
nt and goes on to win the White House, he would be the seventh, not the first black man to occupy the oval office, according to three black historians whose work to uncover the racial backgrounds of U.S. presidents has been largely ignored until now. Black male historians have written extensively that Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Dwight Eisenhower had black ancestors. These historians are Joel A. Rodgers, Dr. Leroy Vaughn, and Dr. Auset Bakhufu. Black historians, however, were not the first to write about the five presidents' racially mixed families. White historians and political opponents also wrote about the men's black ancestors, but the books were either destroyed, went out of print or are hard to find. A common theme associated with the earlier black presidents is that they all passed for white, sometimes destroying family photographs and letters, to hide their racial backgrounds. Sen. Obama cannot obviously pass for white because of his dark skin color. Obama makes it clear he is the son of a Kenyan economist and white female anthropologist. Interracial relationships between black women and white men explain the racial backgrounds of some of the presidents, but not all. Sexual relationships between black men and white women have produced offspring. Andrew Jackson, the nation's seventh's president, was the son of a black man and an Irish woman, according to historians. Interracial relationships between black men and Native American women also produced racially mixed offspring. Rodgers, who died in 1966, wrote the book The Five Black Presidents, and Dr. Vaughn devotes a chapter to the five black presidents in his Black People and Their Place in World History. Rogers and Vaughn agree Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Harding and Coolidge had black ancestors. Dr. Auset Bakhufu, author of The Six Black Presidents' Black Blood: White Masks includes Eisenhower. Despite author Toni Morrison's 1998 New Yorker magazine article that claims Bill Clinton is the nation's first black president because of his womanizing and frequenting McDonald's restaurants, Clinton is not listed.